Today’s Big Story

Are the Kids Alright?

The big problem faced by teens today is deeper than phones. But the screens don’t help.

How are they doing? Young people, I mean. Because there’s somewhat conflicting information floating around. A national survey found promising signs that key mental health measures for teens, especially girls, have improved since the depths of the pandemic. But the number of teens reporting persistent sadness in 2023 remained higher than at any point in the last decade aside from 2021.

“For young people, there is still a crisis in mental health,” Kathleen Ethier, head of the C.D.C.’s adolescent and school health program, told the New York Times. “But we’re also seeing some really important glimmers of hope.” She noted that pediatric emergency visits at Weill Cornell for psychiatry care from January to May 2024 had plateaued, a promising change from the steady increases seen in recent years.

And there’s no denying that kids are living in a time of prosperity. Life expectancy around the world is rising, education is widespread, homicide rates are dropping, and diseases are increasingly curable. If one is lucky enough to have been born in a high-income country, they’ve come of age at a time when risky teenage behaviors, such as sex, drug use, and crime, are in steady decline. Schools now provide increased social-emotional learning and mental health support. Yet today’s teenagers are experiencing rates of anxiety at all-time highs.

Each generation, it seems, believes that the unique conditions that it (or its progeny) encounters are the most challenging. And in a way, each generation is right. We may know intellectually that things were stressful in the past, but the present is the only time in which acute discontent can be felt. Our capacity for anxiety is not caused by the latest gadgets, it is innate. According to Slate, we are hardwired for dissatisfaction, considering our ancestors who sat contentedly on their laurels tended not to pass on their genes. Most of us spend our day-to-day yearning for more, despite the general lack of predators and the abundance of supermarkets. It’s a phenomenon the Buddha identified 2,600 years ago as the first noble truth: Life is suffering.

Then again, solutions to the mental-health crisis striking young people in particular are within reach. In a search for answers and solutions, Jonathan Haidt’s recent best-selling book, The Anxious Generation, ascribed blame to the overuse of screens and social media. That’s because the majority of those who spent more than 20 hours a week on social media, reported that they felt anxiety “a lot of the day yesterday”. Easing up the screen consumption and putting your energy towards a hobby or desire that feeds your interests is a simple way to calm the mind and soothe the soul. If you can develop the discipline to do so.

Ukrainian Troops Dig Trenches in Russia

Every day the Russians don’t counterattack is a day the Ukrainians dig in deeper

Days after Ukraine began a surprise military incursion into Russia’s Kursk border region, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has broken the government’s silence on it by indirectly acknowledging the ongoing military actions to “push the war out into the aggressor’s territory,” in his weekend address to the nation.

On Sunday, Ukraine’s incursion into Russia continued for a sixth day, reports the Associated Press. It’s the largest such attack since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022 and is unprecedented for its use of Ukrainian military units on Russian soil. The Ukrainians are digging trenches. Anticipating static warfare along or near the existing front line, the Russians are digging in, too. That both sides are fortifying their positions doesn’t mean the Ukrainians are done advancing. Nor does it mean the Russians can’t counterattack—and push the Ukrainians back to the border. But it does mean that stabilization of the front line—and a long-term Ukrainian occupation of part of Kursk—is on the table.

The ultimate goal of the Kursk operation remains unclear. Ukraine has given sparing comment, but the early successes are visible in videos shared online of Ukrainian troops raising their flag in several towns and villages near the border, clips of smoldering Russian military vehicles and the often angry posts of nationalist Russian war bloggers close to the military. The current U.S. assessment is that one reason for launching the incursion was to disrupt Russian supply lines. Ukraine has also taken dozens of prisoners, whom it can trade for its own detainees held in Russia.

The Olympics Come to a Close

The Paris Games culminated in a lavish closing ceremony

The Olympics wrapped up Sunday with a lavish closing ceremony. It marked the end of a remarkable 2 1/2 weeks of competition. Sure, there were a few controversies, but on a whole, we can all agree that Paris put on one helluva Games. They cleaned up the Seine, the hosted a modern and sustainable program and provided adrenaline-fueled excitement that hung in the air like the glowing Olympic cauldron that’s floated over the city every night.

From the start, Paris promised an Olympics that’d be green, low-budget and offer lasting improvements to the lives of citizens—particularly in the poor suburbs of Seine-St.-Denis, which hosted dozens of events, the athletes’ village and Sunday’s closing ceremony. And while the official accounting will take some time, many believe they did just that. As for the medal standings for the athletes, the gold medal tally ended in a 40-40 tie between China and the United States. But the U.S. topped the medals table with a whopping 126 overall, compared to 91 for China.

After the athletes paraded into the stadium to say goodbye to the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, the indie group Phoenix and the R&B singer H.E.R. rocked out for the crowds. Then Tom Cruise rappelled off the stadium roof to collect the Olympic flag from the gymnast Simone Biles and sped off on his motorcycle into a waiting plane headed to Los Angeles, where the next summer Olympics is set to take place in 2028. I, for one, am already counting the days.

Airlines Are Running Out of Flight Numbers

No one saw this one coming?

Flight numbers seem banal, but you understand why they’re so important as an identifier: The Federal Aviation Administration handles roughly 45,000 flights per day. On any given day, there are dozens of flights between New York and Chicago, for instance. And in Chicago at O’Hare International Airport alone, one flight takes off or lands every 45 seconds, on average.

Airlines use up to four digits for flight numbers. That means they can have up to 9,999 flights (since there’s no flight zero), and no one comes close. American Airlines operates around 6,700 daily flights including its American Eagle regional services, so they should have plenty of room to grow. Except they don’t. American Airlines, Delta, and United are running out of flight numbers, and nobody knows what to do about it.

One might wonder why the question of running out of flight numbers is such a big deal. After all, we could extend a three-digit flight number system to four, and the four-digit flight number to five, and so forth. However, the solution isn’t as simple as it seems. View From the Wing reported that the solution would require an update on the computer systems that airlines have been using for more than half a decade. So it appears we’re dealing with a Y2K type of situation here.

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